Many Soviets No Longer See Lenin As Model

DATELINE

April 23, 1991|By DAVID REMNICK, The Washington Post

MOSCOW -- For decades, April 22 had been a day on which front pages in the Soviet Union were filled with the Lenin gospel, the story of an unfailingly modest man`s quest for a just revolution. Now, as the state he founded meets on Monday`s 121st anniversary of his birth, Soviet newspapers feature full- scale assaults on Lenin`s reputation, or, in the case of Communist Party papers, defensive ``reassessments.``

``A country lives not only on its economy and institutions but also on its mythology and founding fathers,`` Vyacheslav Shostokovsky, former rector of the Communist Party Higher School, said recently. ``It`s a devastating thing for any society to discover that their greatest myths are based not on truth but propaganda and fantasy. But that is what we are experiencing now in the case of Lenin and the revolution.``

A recent Communist Party poll in 10 regions of the country indicated that only a slight majority -- 52.2 percent -- felt that the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution had been a ``correct step in our historical development.`` In large cities such as Moscow, where education levels are higher and access to independent media far greater, more than half of those surveyed said the revolution had been a ``historical mistake.``

Tatyana Zaslavskaya, a leading sociologist and a member of the Soviet legislature, cited other polls showing that nearly 80 percent of all young people of college age and younger ``were distinctly anti-communist and anti- socialist`` and favored private property and other capitalist institutions long derided by Lenin and his successors.

Anti-communist demonstrators in Soviet Georgia, the Baltic republics and elsewhere around the multinational empire have been upending Lenin statues for two years to protest the Kremlin`s rule. But now the assault on Lenin and his revolution has spread to the heart and head of the body politic.

Soviet historians and Communist Party officials, who once had limited their criticism of official policies to the period beginning with the death of Lenin and the rise of Joseph Stalin, have been forced to look harder at the leading personality of the revolution.

At a scholarly conference on Lenin in Moscow a few weeks ago, Richard Pipes, a Harvard University professor, was prepared to startle his audience with an unforgiving assessment of the Soviet icon. ``Some of you may not like what I have to say,`` Pipes began and then proceeded to castigate Lenin as intolerant, brutal, fanatical, dishonest, inhumane, cowardly and the creator of a one-party state based on terror.

Until about two years ago, Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev and the ideological machinery of the Communist Party had tried to encourage a new perspective on the past, one in which Stalin and his circle were held almost solely responsible for betraying the heritage of Lenin and the revolution.

But now even Gorbachev, who says he will remain a ``committed Communist to the end of my days,`` has taken issue with Lenin. In the midst of an otherwise doctrinaire speech in Minsk last month, Gorbachev said in mild, but unmistakably critical terms, that Lenin had erred when he dissolved the democratically elected Constituent Assembly in 1918 and instituted one-party rule by force.

Pipes and a growing number of Soviet historians say it was Lenin who gave the Soviet state its personality of intolerance and xenophobia and who established the structures of the terror years. ``Stalin only expanded them to colossal size and increased the range of what was considered an enemy of the revolution,`` said Yuri Afanasyev, rector of the Soviet Historical Archives Institute.

Meanwhile, the Lenin Mausoleum in Red Square, ordinarily a place of pilgrimage on his birthday, is closed for repairs.